EAST OR WEST, HOME IS DAMNED

Well, the Chinese Premier arrived in Kenya a few days ago and yesterday, a broad trade-deal was signed amid all the statist fanfare and diplomatic tinsel that attends such events. Journalists, in their characteristic wide-eyed naïveté, were not slow to herald the deal with the Asian ‘economic powerhouse’ as a welcome shift in policy. For a long time, it has been common belief that the Chinese have pursued a policy of mutually beneficial trade relations with respect to Africa, while consistently staying out of internal affairs. This was a notion that was reiterated by Yoweri Museveni at the ceremony at statehouse: unlike other countries, he said, which want to dictate how to run government, China was solely concerned with development and mutual engagement.

 It obviously did not occur to him that perhaps the reason China would not bother with such dictation- even if they had the will- is that the Chinese communist Party is one of the most brutal and repressive regimes in the modern world. You would look ridiculous- maybe even slightly mad- condemning your neighbor for scolding his wife when people know that you beat your own. But even worse than failing to associate China’s domestic policies with its putatively hands-off foreign policy is the very ignorant belief that China’s foreign policy is a no-strings-attached policy- if not an entirely altruistic one. It does not take a rocket scientist to see the lie to this.

Since China began a series of market reforms in response to the calamitous social experiment engineered and imposed by Mao Tsetung, its resources have come under increasing strain due to rapid industrialization. As China’s per capita income has swelled, so has its effect on the global prices of natural resources. According to a 2009 Center for Strategic Leadership (CSL) report, China’s economic expansion had by 2004 driven up global oil prices by 33%, Copper by 37%, and aluminum & Zinc by 25%.  In 2003, China consumed a quarter of all aluminum and Steel, 32% of Iron ore and coal, and 40% of cement output. Previously self-sufficient in petroleum, China by 2007 imported 3.7 million barrels per day, against an average daily consumption of 7.5 million barrels. By 2025, China’s daily petroleum consumption is projected to rise to 14 million barrels.

It is against this urgency to procure resources in the face of diminishing local reserves that China’s incursions into Africa (and elsewhere) must be appraised. It may be dismissed as sheer conjecture that the impetus behind the bilateral agreements that China has entered into with African nations is its economic self-interest. If so, looking at the PRC’s actions on the continent only bears out this conjecture.

In recent years, China has poured billions of dollars in the form of aid and Foreign Direct Investment into resource-rich African nations: Angola, Madagascar, Nigeria, Sudan, and Zimbabwe have all been recipients of Chinese development aid. Contrary to popular wisdom, however, it is not true that this aid has come with no strings attached; political strings may be absent in most cases, but certainly not economic ones.

Looking at the PRC’s actions in Africa over the last decade, a pattern swiftly comes to light: China offers developmental aid and in exchange receives title to natural resources. This modus operandi has been repeated across the continent, from Gabon to Zimbabwe; from Zaire to Sudan. In 2008, China signed an infrastructure development deal with Zaire worth about $8 billion. In return, Zaire’s mining company, Gecamines, ceded two pivotal copper deposits to China. Curiously, these deposits will not yield copper until at least 2020. Chinese operations following this archetype of exchanging developmental aid for natural resources have been established across Africa.

These operations have gained specific notoriety for their unpleasant treatment of workers and miserly remuneration. In 2008, STRATFOR reported that Chinese copper mining operations in Zambia have come under fire over non-competitive wages. In 2010, officials at a Chinese mine in Zambia fired at and injured eleven workers who were protesting over poor pay. In a June, 2013 report on the Katanga copper mine in Zaire, Amnesty International detailed the privative circumstances in which artisanal miners worked, and the attendant cases of serious injury at the mine.

China has always sold its foreign policy as hands-off and non-interventionist. But the reality does not quite tally with this claim. For decades, China has been one of Mugabe’s primary allies, supplying the despot with, among other things, anti-riot equipment. In 2008, The Economist carried an article titled Oil for China, Guns for Darfur, in which it criticized China for selling weapons to a genocidal regime. China has employed military assistance to curry favor with several countries across Africa; most notably, Angola. It’s a little wonder, then, that tyrants the world over will not stop singing the praises of the PRC.

So far as I know, the finer details of the Sino-Kenyan trade agreement have not been divulged. Before that happens, we need to disabuse ourselves of the idea that the deepening Sino-Kenyan ties will in any remarkable way be different to previous economic relations with Western states. In all likelihood, this will all end in bitterness and disappointment. As journalists read out the booty that Kenya would accrue from the agreement, the question on my mind- and the question I feel should be on every Kenyan’s mind- was: what’s in it for China? If previous experience says anything, the newly-discovered oil deposits in Turkana may be the answer.